Chapter XXVII: Realism in France (2)

His very first picture, exhibited in 1855, was called "At Home." A charming little woman is warming her feet at the fire; she has returned from visiting a friend, and it has been raining or snowing outside. Her delicate hands are frozen in spite of her muff, her cheeks have been reddened by the wind, and she has a pleasant sense of comfort as her rosy lips breathe the warm air of the room. From the time of this picture women took possession of Stevens' easel. His way was prescribed for him, and he never left it. Robert Fleury, the president of the judging committee in the Salon, said to him: "You are a good painter, but alter your subjects; you are stifling in a sphere which is too small; how wide and grand is that of the past!" Whereon Stevens is said to have showed him a volume of photographs from Velasquez. "Look here at Velasquez," he said. "This man never represented anything but what he had before his eyes--people in the Spanish dress of the seventeenth century. And as the justification of my _genre_ may be found in this Spanish painter, it may be found also in Rubens, Raphael, Van Dyck, and all the great artists. All these masters of the past derived their strength and the secret of their endurance from the faithful reproduction of what they had themselves seen: it gives their pictures a real historical as well as an artistic value. One can only render successfully what one has felt sincerely and seen vividly before one's eyes in flesh and blood." In these sentences he is at one with Courbet, and by not allowing himself to be led astray into doing sacrifice to the idols of historical painting he continues to live as the historical painter of the _Parisienne_.

CHAPLIN. PORTRAIT OF COUNTESS AIMERY DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.]

In his whole work he sounds a pæan to the delicate and all-powerful mistress of the world, and it is significant that it was through woman that art joined issue with the interests of the present. Millet, the first who conquered a province of modern life, was at the same time the first great painter of women in the century. Stevens shows the other side of the medal. In Millet woman was a product of nature; in Stevens she is the product of modern civilisation. The woman of Millet lives a large animal life, in the sweat of her brow, bowed to the earth. She is the primæval mother who works, bears children, and gives them nourishment. She stands in the field like a caryatid, like a symbol of fertile nature. In Stevens woman does not toil and is seldom a mother. He paints the woman who loves, enjoys, and knows nothing of the great pangs of child-birth and hunger. The one woman lives beneath the wide, open sky, _dans le grand air_; the other is only enveloped in an atmosphere of perfume. She is ancient Cybele in the pictures of Millet; in those of Stevens the holy Magdalene of the nineteenth century, to whom much will be forgiven, because she has loved much. The pictures of Stevens represent, for the first time, the potent relations of woman to the century. Whilst most works of this time are silent concerning ourselves, his art will speak of our weaknesses and our passions. In a period of archaic painting he upheld the banner of modernity. On this account posterity will honour him as one of the first historians of the nineteenth century, and will learn from his pictures all that Greuze has revealed to the present generation about the civilisation of the eighteenth century.

GAILLARD. PORTRAIT.]

And perhaps more, for Stevens never moralised--he merely painted. Painter to his finger tips, like Delacroix, Roqueplan, and Isabey, he stood in need of no anecdotic substratum as an adjunct. The key of his pictures was suggested by no theme of one sort or another, but by his treatment of colour. The picture was evolved from the first tone he placed upon the canvas, which was the ground-note of the entire scale. He delighted in a thick pasty handling, in beautiful hues, and in finely chased detail. And he was as little inclined to sentimentality as to pictorial novels. Everything is discreet, piquant, and full of charm. He was a delicate spirit, avoiding tears and laughter. Subdued joy, melancholy, and everything delicate and reserved are what he loves; he will have nothing to do with stereotyped arrangement nor supernumerary figures, but although a single person dominates the stage he never repeats himself. He has followed woman through all her metamorphoses--as mother or in love, weary or excited, proud or humbled, fallen or at the height of success, in her morning-gown or dressed for visiting or a promenade, now on the sea-shore, now in the costume of a Japanese, or dallying with her trinkets as she stands vacantly before the glass. The surroundings invariably form an accompaniment to the melody. A world of exquisite things is the environment of the figures. Rich stuffs, charming _petit-riens_ from China and Japan, the most delicate ivory and lacquer-work, the finest bronzes, Japanese fire-screens, and great vases with blossoming sprays, fill the boudoir and drawing-room of the _Parisienne_. In the pictures of Stevens she is the fairy of a paradise made up of all the most capricious products of art. A new world was discovered, a painting which was in touch with life; the symphony of the salon was developed in a delicate style. A tender feminine perfume, something at once melancholy and sensuous, was exhaled from the pictures of Stevens, and by this shade of _demi-monde haut-goût_ he won the great public. They could not rise to Millet and Courbet, and Stevens was the first who gave general pleasure without paying toll to the vicious taste for melodramatic, narrative, and humorous _genre_ painting. Even in the sixties he was appreciated in England, France, Germany, Russia, and Belgium, and represented in all public and private collections; and through the wide reception offered to his pictures he contributed much to create in the public a comprehension for good painting.

DUBOIS. PORTRAIT OF MY SONS.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

In the same way _James Tissot_ achieved the representation of the modern woman. Stevens, a Belgian, painted the _Parisienne_; Tissot, a Frenchman, the Englishwoman. It was not till they went into foreign countries that these artists perceived the grace of what was not deemed suitable to art at home. In Paris from the year 1859 Tissot had painted scenes from the fifteenth century, to which he was moved by Leys, and he studied with archæological accuracy the costume and furniture of the late Gothic period. When he migrated to England in 1871 he gave up the romantic proclivities of his youth, and devoted himself to the representation of fashionable society. His oil paintings fascinate us by their delicate feeling for cool transparent tone values, whilst his water-colours--restaurant, theatre, and ball scenes--assure him a place among the pioneers of modernity.

At first Stevens found no successors amongst Parisian painters. A few, indeed, painted interiors in graceful Paris, but they were only frigid compositions of dresses and furniture, without a breath of that delicate aroma which exhales from the works of the Belgian. The portrait painters alone approached that modern grace which still awaited its historian and poet.

An exceedingly delicate artist, _Gustave Ricard_, in whose portraits the art of galleries had a congenial revival, was called the modern Van Dyck in the sixties. Living nature did not content him; he wished to learn how it was interpreted by the old masters, and therefore frequented galleries, where he sought counsel sometimes from the English portrait-painters, sometimes from Leonardo, Rubens, and Van Dyck. In this way Ricard became a _gourmet_ of colour, who knew the technique of the old masters as few others have done, and his works have an attractive golden gallery-tone of great distinction.

In _Charles Chaplin_ Fragonard was revived. He was the specialist of languishing flesh and _poudre de riz_, the refined interpreter of aristocratic beauty, one on whose palette there might still be found a delicate reflection of the _fêtes galantes_ of the eighteenth century. In Germany he was principally known by those dreamy, frail, and sensual maidens, well characterised by the phrase of the Empress Eugénie. "M. Chaplin," she said, "I admire you. Your pictures are not merely indecorous, they are more." But Chaplin had likewise the other qualities of the _rococo_ painter. He was a decorative artist of the first rank, and, like Fragonard, he carelessly scattered round him on all sides grace and beauty, charm and fascination. In 1857 he decorated the _Salon des Fleurs_ in the Tuileries, in 1861-65 the bathroom of the Empress in the _Palais de l'Elysée_, and from 1865 a number of private houses in Paris, Brussels, and New York; and there is in all these works a refined _haut-goût_ of modern Parisian elegance and fragrant _rococo_ grace. He revived no nymphs, and made no pilgrimage to the island of Cythera; he was more of an epicurean. But Fragonard's fine tones and Fragonard's sensuousness were peculiar to him. He had a method of treating the hair, of introducing little patches, of setting a dimple in the chin, and painting the arms and bosom, which had vanished since the _rococo_ period from the power of French artists. Rosebuds and full-blown roses blossom like girls _à la_ Greuze, and fading beauties, who are all the more irresistible, are the elements out of which his refined, indecorous, and yet fragrant art is constituted.

BONNAT. ADOLPHE THIERS.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

The great engraver _Gaillard_ brought Hans Holbein once more into honour. He was the heir of that method of painting, the eternal matrix of which Jan van Eyck left to the world in unapproachable perfection. His energetic but conscientiously minute brush noted every wrinkle of the face, without doing injury to the total impression by this labour of detail. Indeed, his pictures are as great in conception and as powerful in characterisation as they are small in size. Gaillard is a profound physiognomist who attained the most vivid analysis of character by means of the utmost precision.

_Paul Dubois_ takes us across the Alps; in his portraits he is the same great quattrocentist that he was from the beginning in his plastic works. His ground is that of the excellent and subtle period when Leonardo, who had been in the beginning somewhat arid, grew delicate and allowed a mysterious sphinx-like smile to play round the lips of his women. Manifestly he has studied Prudhon and had much intercourse with Henner in those years when the latter, after his return from Italy, directed attention once more to the old Lombards. From the time when he made his début in 1879, with the portrait of his sons, he received great encouragement, and stands out in these days as the most mature painter of women that the present age has to show. Only the great English portrait painters Watts and Millais, who are inferior to him in technique, have excelled him in the embodiment of personalities.

As the most skilful painter of drapery, the most brilliant decorator of feminine beauty, _Carolus Duran_ was long celebrated. The studies which he had made in Italy had not caused him to forget that he took his origin from across the Flemish border; and when he appeared with his first portraits, in the beginning of the seventies, it was believed that an eminent colourist had been born to French painting. At that time he had a fine feeling for the eternal feminine and its transitory phases of expression, and he was as dexterous in seizing a fleeting gesture or a turn of the head as he was in the management of drapery and the play of its hues. Then, again, he made a gradual transition from delicate and discreetly coquettish works to the crude arts of upholstery. Yet even in his last period he has painted some masculine portraits--those of Pasteur, and of the painters Français, Fritz Thaulow, and René Billotte--which are striking in their vigorous simplicity and unforced characterisation after the glaring virtuosity of his pictures of women.

BONNAT. VICTOR HUGO.

(_By permission of the Artist._)]

_Léon Bonnat_, the pupil of Madrazos, brought about the fruitful connection between French painting and that of the old Spaniards. By this a large quantity of the fresh blood of naturalism was poured into it once more. Born in the South of France and educated in Spain, he had conceived there a special enthusiasm for Ribera, and these youthful impressions were so powerful that he remained faithful to them in Paris. As early as his residence in Italy, which included the three years from 1858 to 1860, his individuality had been fortified in a degree which prevented him from wasting himself on large academical compositions like the holders of the _Prix de Rome_; on the contrary, he painted scenes from the varied life of the Roman people. Several religious pictures, such as "The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew" (1863), "Saint Vincent de Paul" (1866), and the "Job" of the Luxembourg, showed that he was steadily progressing on the road paved by Spagnoletto. He had a virtuosity in conjuring on to the canvas visages furrowed by the injustices of life--grey hair, waving grey beards, and the starting sinews and muscles of old weather-beaten frames. In the beginning of the seventies, when he had to paint a Crucifixion for the jury-chamber in the Paris Palais de Justice, he executed a virile figure, the muscles and anatomy of which were as clearly marked as the buttresses in a Gothic cathedral. As in the paintings of Caravaggio, a sharp, glaring light fell upon certain parts of the body, whilst others remained dark and colourless in the gloomy background. He applied the same principles to his portraits. A French Lenbach, he painted in France a gallery of celebrated men. With an almost tangible reality he painted Hugo, Madame Pasta, Dumas, Gounod, Thiers, Grévy, Pasteur, Puvis de Chavannes, Jules Ferry, Carnot, Cardinal Lavigerie, and others. Over two hundred persons, famous or not, have sat to him, and he has painted them with an exceedingly intelligent power, masculine taste, and a learning which never loses itself in unnecessary detail.

The delicate physiognomy of women, the _frou-frou_ of exquisite toilettes, the dreaminess, the fragrance, the coquetry of the modern Sphinx, were no concern of his. On the other hand, his masculine portraits will always keep their interest, if only on historical grounds. In all of them he laid great stress on characteristic accessories, and could indicate in the simplest way the thinker, the musician, the scholar, and the statesman. One remembers his pictures as though they were phrases uttered with conviction, though a German does not hesitate to place Lenbach far above Bonnat as a psychologist. The latter has not the power of seizing the momentary effect, the intimacy, the personal note, the palpitating life peculiar to Lenbach. With the intention of saying all things he often forgets the most important--the spirit of the man and the grace of the woman. His pictures are great pieces of still-life--exceedingly conscientious, but having something of the conscientiousness of an actuary copying a tedious protocol. The portrait of Léon Cogniet, the teacher of the master, with his aged face, his spectacled eyes, and his puckered hands (Musée Luxembourg), is perhaps the only likeness in which Bonnat rivals Lenbach in depth of characterisation. His pictorial strength is always worthy of respect; but, for the sake of variety, the _esprit_ is for once on the side of the German.

Ruled by a passion for the Spanish masters, such as Bonnat possessed, _Roybet_ painted cavaliers of the seventeenth century, and other historical pictures of manners, which are distinguished, to their advantage, from older pictures of their type, because it is not the historical anecdote but the pictorial idea which is their basis. All the earlier painters were rather bent upon archæological accuracy than on pictorial charm in the treatment of such themes. Roybet revelled in the rich hues of old costumes, and sometimes attained, before he strained his talent in the Procrustean bed of pictures of great size, a bloom and a strong, glowing tone which rival the old masters.

VOLLON. A CARNIVAL SCENE.]

In all periods which have learnt to see the world through a pictorial medium, still-life has held an important place in the practice of art. A technical instinct, which is in itself art, delights in investing musical instruments, golden and silver vessels, fruit and other eatables, glasses and goblets, coverings of precious work, gauntlets and armour, all imaginable _petit-riens_, with an artistic magic, in recognising and executing pictorial problems everywhere. After the transition from historical and _genre_ painting had been made to painting proper there once more appeared great painters of still-life in France as there did in Chardin's days.

Yet _Blaise Desgoffe_, who painted piecemeal and with laborious patience goldsmith's work, crystal vases, Venetian glass, and such things, is certainly rather petty. In France he was the chief representative of that precise and detailed painting which understands by art a deceptive imitation of objects, and sees its end attained when the holiday public gathers round the pictures as the birds gathered round the grapes of Zeuxis.

It is as if an old master had revived in _Philippe Rousseau_. He had the same earnest qualities as the Dutch and Flemish Classic masters--a broad, liquid, pasty method of execution, a fine harmony of clear and powerful tones--and with all this a marvellous address in so composing objects that no trace of "composition" is discernible. His work arose from the animal picture. His painting of dogs and cats is to be ranked with the best of the century. He makes a fourth with Gillot, Chardin, and Decamps, the great painters of monkeys. As a decorator of genius, like Hondekoeter, he embellished a whole series of dining-halls with splendidly coloured representations of poultry, and, like Snyders, he heaped together game, dead and living fowl, fruit, lobsters, and oysters into huge life-size masses of still-life. Behind them the cook may be seen, and thievish cats steal around. But, like Kalf, he has also painted, with an exquisite feeling for colour, Japanese porcelain bowls with bunches of grapes, quinces, and apricots, metal and ivory work, helmets and fiddles, against that delicate grey-brown-green tone of background which Chardin loved.

BONVIN. THE COOK.]

_Antoine Vollon_ became the greatest painter of still-life in the century. Indeed, Vollon is as broad and nervous as Desgoffe is precise and pedantic. Flowers, fruit, and fish--they are all painted in with a firm hand, and shine out of the dark background with a full liquid freshness of colour. He paints dead salt-water fish like Abraham van Beyeren, grapes and crystal goblets like Davids de Heem, dead game like Frans Snyders, skinned pigs like Rembrandt and Maes. He is a master in the representation of freshly gathered flowers, delicate vegetables, copper kettles, weapons, and suits of armour. Since Chardin no painter depicted the qualities of the skin of fresh fruit, its life and its play of colour, and the moist bloom that rests upon it, with such fidelity to nature. His fish in particular will always remain the wonder of all painters and connoisseurs. But landscapes, Dutch canal views, and figure-pictures are also to be found amongst his works. He has painted everything that is picturesque, and the history of art must do him honour as, in a specifically pictorial sense, one of the greatest in the century. A soft grey-brown wainscoting, a black and white Pierrot costume, and a white table-cloth and dark green vegetables--such is the harmony of colour which he chiefly loved in his figure-pictures.

On the same purely pictorial grounds nuns became very popular in painting, as their white hoods and collars standing out against a black dress gave the opportunity for such a fine effect of tone. This was the province in which poor _François Bonvin_ laboured. Deriving from the Dutch, he conceived an enthusiasm for work, silence, the subdued shining of light in interiors, cold days, the slow movements and peaceful faces of nuns, and painted kitchen scenes with a strong personal accent. Before he took up painting he was for a long time a policeman, and was employed in taking charge of the markets. Here he acquired an eye for the picturesqueness of juicy vegetables, white collars, and white hoods, and when he had a day free he studied Lenain and Chardin in the Louvre. Bonvin's pictures have no anecdotic purport. Drinkers, cooks, orphan children in the schoolroom, sempstresses, choristers, sisters of mercy, boys reading, women in church, nuns conducting a sewing-class--Bonvin's still, picturesque, congenial world is made up of elements such as these. What his people may think or do is no matter: they are only meant to create an effect as pictorial tones in space. During his journey to Holland he had examined Metsu, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hoogh, Terborg, and Van der Meer with an understanding for their merits, but it was Chardin in both his phases--as painter of still-life and of familiar events--who was in a special sense revived in Bonvin. All his pictures are simple and quiet; his figures are peaceful in their expression, and have an easy geniality of pose; his hues have a beauty and fulness of tone recalling the old masters.

BONVIN. THE WORK-ROOM.]

Even _Théodule Ribot_, the most eminent of the group, one of the most dexterous executants of the French school, a master who for power of expression is worthy of being placed between Frans Hals and Ribera, made a beginning with still-life. He was born in 1823, in a little town of the department of Eure. Early married and poor, he supported himself at first by painting frames for a firm of mirror manufacturers, and only reserved the hours of the evening for his artistic labours. In particular he is said to have accustomed himself to work whole nights through by lamplight, while he nursed his wife during a long illness, watching at her bedside. The lamplight intensified the contrasts of light and shadow. Thus Ribot's preference for concentrated light and strong shadows is partially due, in all probability, to what he had gone through in his life, and in later days Ribera merely bestowed upon him a benediction as his predecessor in the history of art.

His first pictures from the years 1861 to 1865 were, for the most part, scenes from household and kitchen life: cooks, as large as life, plucking poultry, setting meat before the fire, scouring vessels, or tasting sauces; sometimes, also, figures in the streets; but even here there was a strong accentuation of the element of still-life. There were men with cooking utensils, food, dead birds, and fish. Then after 1865 there followed a number of religious pictures which, in their hard, peasant-like veracity and their impressive, concentrated life, stood in the most abrupt contrast with the conventionally idealised figures of the academicians. His "Jesus in the Temple," no less than "Saint Sebastian" and "The Good Samaritan"--all three in the Musée Luxembourg--are works of simple and forceful grandeur, and have a thrilling effect which almost excites dismay. Sebastian is no smiling saint gracefully embellished with wounds, but a suffering man, with the blood streaming from his veins, stretched upon the earth; yet half-raising himself, a cry of agony upon his lips, and his whole body contorted by spasms of pain. In his "Jesus in the Temple," going on parallel lines with Menzel, he proclaims the doctrine that it is only possible to pour new life-blood into traditional figures by a tactful choice of models from popular life around. And in "The Good Samaritan," also, he was only concerned to paint, with naturalistic force, the body of a wounded man lying in the street, a thick-set French peasant robbed of his clothes. From the seventies his specialty was heads--separate figures of weather-beaten old folk, old women knitting or writing, old men reading or lost in thought; and these will always be ranked with the greatest masterpieces of the century. Ribot attains a remarkable effect when he paints those expressive faces of his, which seem to follow you with their looks, and are thrown out from the darkness of his canvas. A black background, in which the dark dresses of his figures are insensibly lost, a luminous head with such eyes as no one of the century has ever painted, wrinkled skin and puckered old hands rising from somewhere--one knows not whence--these are things which all lend his figures something phantasmal, superhuman, and ghostly. Ribot is the great king of the under-world, to which a sunbeam only penetrates by stealth. Before his pictures one has the sense of wandering in a deep, deep shaft of some mine, where all is dark and only now and then a lantern glimmers. No artist, not even Ribera, has been a better painter of old people, and only Velasquez has painted children who have such sparkling life. Ribot worked in Colombes, near Paris, to which place he had early withdrawn, in a barn where only tiny dormer-windows let in two sharp rays of light.

RIBOT. AT A NORMAN INN.]

By placing his canvas beneath one window and his model beneath the other, in a dim light which allowed only one golden ray to fall upon the face, he isolated it completely from its surroundings, and in this way painted the parts illuminated with the more astonishing effect. No one had the same power in modelling a forehead, indicating the bones beneath the flesh, and rendering all the subtleties of skin. A terrible and intense life is in his figures. His old beggars and sailors especially have something kingly in the grand style of their noble and quiet faces. An old master with a powerful technique, a painter of the force and health of Jordaens, has manifested himself once more in Ribot.

RIBOT. KEEPING ACCOUNTS.]

Courbet's principles, accordingly, had won all down the line, in the course of a few years. "It is only Ribera, Zurbaran, and Velasquez that I admire; Ostade and Craesbeeck also allure me; and for Holbein I feel veneration. As for M. Raphael, there is no doubt that he has painted some interesting portraits, but I cannot find any ideas in him." In these words he had prophesied as early as 1855 the course which French art would take in the next decade. When Courbet appeared the grand painting stood in thraldom to the _beauté suprême_, and the æsthetic conceptions of the time affected the treatment of contemporary subjects. Artists had not realism enough to give truth and animation to these themes. When Cabanel, Hamon, and Bouguereau occasionally painted beggars and orphans, they were bloodless phantoms, because by beautifying the figures they deprived them of character in the effort to give them, approximately, the forms of historical painting. Because painters did not regard their own epoch, because they had been accustomed to consider living beings merely as elements of the second and third rank, they never discovered the distinctiveness of their essential life. Like a traveller possessed by one fixed mania, they made a voyage round the world, thinking only how they might adapt living forms to those which their traditional training recommended as peculiarly right and alone worthy of art. Even portrait painting was dominated by this false method, of rendering figures as types, of improving the features and the contour of bodies, and giving men the external appearance of fair, ideal figures.

But now the sway of the Cinquecento has been finally broken. A fresh breeze of realism from across the Pyrenees has taken the place of the sultry Italian sirocco. From the pictures of the Neapolitans, the Spaniards, and the Dutch it has been learnt that the joys and sorrows of the people are just as capable of representation as the actions of gods and heroes, and under the influence of these views a complete change in the cast has taken place.

RIBOT. ST. SEBASTIAN, MARTYR.]

The figures which in 1855 filled Courbet's picture "The Studio"--beggar-women, agricultural labourers, artisans, sailors, tippling soldiers, buxom girls, porters, rough members of the proletariat of uncouth stature--now crowd the stage of French art, and impart even to the heroes of history, bred through centuries from degenerated gods, something of their full-blooded, rough, hearty, and plebeian force of life. The artists of Italian taste only gave the rights of citizenship to "universal forms"; every reminiscence of national customs or of local character was counted vulgar; they did not discover the gold of beauty in the rich mines of popular life, but in the classic masters of foreign race. But now even what is unearthly is translated into the terms of earth. If religious pictures are to be painted, artists take men from the people for their model, as Caravaggio did before them--poor old peasants with bones of iron, and bronzed, weather-beaten faces, porters with figures bowed and scarred by labour, men of rough, common nature, though of gnarled and sinewy muscles. The pictures of martyrs, once artificial compositions of beautiful gesture and vacant, generalised countenances, receive a tone local to the scaffold, a trait of merciless veracity--the heads the energy of a relief, the gestures force and impressiveness, the bodies a science in their modelling which would have rejoiced Ribera. As Caravaggio said that the more wrinkles his model had the more he liked him, so no one is any longer repelled by horny hands, tattered rags, and dirty feet. In the good periods of art it is well known that the beauty or uncomeliness of a work has nothing to do with the beauty or uncomeliness of the model, and that the most hideous cripple can afford an opportunity for making the most beautiful work. The old doctrine of Leonardo, that every kind of painting is portrait painting, and that the best artists are those who can imitate nature in the most convincing way, comes once more into operation. The apotheosis of the model has taken the place of idealism. And during these same years England reached a similar goal by another route.

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